Autodidact: (n) a self-taught person. Poet: (n) a person who writes poetry.
Autodidactpoet: (n) A blog full of thoughts from a self-taught writer.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

The achingly honest truth: What do we do when we're tired?

Yeah. Still writing about it. (If you don't know what "it" is,
make sure to read part one...and if you're curious, part 2 and part 3). As I start to prepare for Tuesday, and for
going back to the classroom, and deciding what I will and won't say to my
students...and deciding what I will and won't do to make myself feel safe...and
deciding how I will and will not (or, more likely, can and cannot) mentally
prepare myself for the challenge I know this will present for me, and my body,
and my soul...I'm overwhelmed. And I'm
really freaking tired.

I'm going to be
painfully honest here. Painful for me,
because I don't want to write this, because...well...it kinda makes me look bad. But I think honesty is important, because,
I've heard, that my honesty sometimes illuminates truths for others, and that's
something I can do, right? I can write
truth, even when I'm tired.

So here's the achingly honest,
complicated truth: I wish I had not
entered into this battle. I wish I
had been able to just chalk creepy-union-rep-dude up to just having poor social
skills, and that I had never written about it, or talked about it, or emailed
anyone about it. I wish that every trace of that experience had never seen the light
of day outside of that classroom.

And here's the other
part of that achingly honest, complicated truth: wishing that makes me feel like a bad person. It makes me feel weak. It makes me feel like a bad feminist. It makes me feel like a fraud, and it makes me
feel guilty. How can I be this person
who TEACHES about privilege and oppression and power and being an ally...and
also want to sweep my own experiences under the rug and pretend they never
happened, thus condoning and perpetuating the status quo? How can I be a person who strives to be
active in the world of social justice...and also actively silence myself and my
experiences because of the very social constructs I want so badly to fight
against?

The answer, of course,
is startlingly simple: because I'm human.
Because even when -- perhaps especially when -- you are
"awake" to these experiences, and can name what is wrong in them, and
pick apart your reactions and identify them as being mediated by societal
influences you want to fight...even then, you're still part of that
sociocultural/political web of oppression.
Just because I can name these things, or write some semi-cogent thoughts
about them, it doesn't mean I'm exempt. It's
easy to advocate for issues you do not personally live.

I think, though, about
how things never happen in a vacuum. I
think about how the response I received may be indicative of underlying issues
throughout the organization that others are fighting (or maybe should be
fighting, but are not). I think about
how I, as a teacher and not an undergraduate, may have a power and privilege
and voice that would not be afforded to someone else fighting a similar
concern. I think about how I have been
through a similar struggle before, and it may have given me knowledge and
experience (and therefore power) that even other teachers may not have.

Here's the final piece
of that raw and throbbing truth: even though I don't want to, even though I
know better, and even though I see entirely clearly what I am doing, I doubt my experience and the legitimacy of
my concerns. "Oh Autodidact,"
I say to myself, "you're making a big deal out of nothing. You're just reacting this way because of
things that happened in the past."
Or "you're just reacting this way because you're
anxious." Or even, I'm embarrassed
to admit "you're just reacting this way because you're emotional and your
hormones are out of whack." (It's
called internalized oppression, folks.
That shit's real).

And I guess that's the
thing: I can academicize (is that a word?) the hell out of the thing. I can talk theory, and rhetoric, and spew big
words about these issues, and it doesn't change a bit of it. It does not change my experience, or my
reactions, or the way people respond to me.
When it comes down to it, I'm just as much of a fish in the
sociocultural pond as the next person, and we're all struggling to see the
water we're swimming in. Even when you
think you're seeing the water, you're not.
And even when you think you've accepted or rejected various components
of the water, you haven't, really, because you're steeped in the stuff. You're still breathing it, and marinating in
it, and being subconsciously indoctrinated by it, even as you name it and
reject it. There's not a damn thing you
can do about it, except continue to chip away at it and acknowledge that you're
just another fish struggling to see the water we swim in.

That makes it all feel
helpless, you know? It makes me
tired. It makes me feel like it's not
worth the fight. I've been here before,
in other ways. I've lost here before. This is perhaps both my greatest strength,
and the thing that renders me immobile.

So my question, then,
is this: how do we do this, even when we're tired? How do we, any of us, continue our personal
fights for justice and equality and safety as we continue to drink from the
dirtied water and breathe the fumes of privilege, marginalization, and
oppression? How do we have the energy to
fight, and to breathe, and to keep walking forward, knowing we walk into an air
that is just as dirtied, and knowing that our streams are still polluted? How do we have the strength to keep believing
in the war when we lose battle after battle, and when we must come home and sit
with those raw and painful truths?

I'm not stupid...I know
the answer is supposed to be "self-care." It's supposed to be "supportive friends"
and "breathing" or "yoga" or "smashing things like the
Incredible Hulk" or whatever it is you do to make you able to
re-engage. But this...this is different,
somehow. This isn't just a "tired
of people being assholes" struggle.
It's not just "sick of the jerks and their jerky-jerk
ways." This is a bone-tired sort of
tired. A world-weary sort of tired.

2 comments:

I think all the great fighter/activist/poet/feminst people everywhere (especially those who are also clinical psychologists) have to do something equivalent to binge-watching Breaking Bad or re-reading Jurassic Park for the 10,000th time every once in awhile to turn off that part of their brain that is ANALYSIS, PROCESS, RADICAL HONESTY, PERSISTENT BATTLE, RAW TRUTH. Most of us can't survive without a little vacuousness now and then...

Thanks, Lisa. I think you're right. I've just never been very good at finding the off switch for that part of my brain...even while binge-watching Breaking Bad or re-reading Jurassic Park. But you're definitely right...especially for those among us in the helping professions...it's important to get good at shutting the whole "THINKING INTENSELY ABOUT EVERYTHING" thing down.

About Me

"My continuing passion is to part a curtain,
that invisible shadow that falls between people,
the veil of indifference to each other's presence,
each other's wonder, each other's human plight."
Eudora Welty